Dell EMC peddles post-merger integration at VMworld
Hyperconverged infrastructure and data protection the focus on first day of VMworld
With the anniversary of Dell's acquisition of data storage giant EMC about two months away, the newly combined company is claiming it is continuing to more tightly integrate its various businesses and roll out new products for channel partners.
That was evident on the first day of VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada, with Dell EMC officials unveiling enhancements to its hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, data protection offerings and storage systems that it said will help drive adoption of technologies such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
The latest announcements illustrate the broad capabilities Michael Dell and other Dell executives said it envisioned when the technology vendor bought EMC and its collection of companies - including VMware, RSA, Pivotal and Virtustream - for more than $60 billion. They argued that having such a complete portfolio of hardware, software and services was critical as businesses continue their digital evolution, embracing emerging technologies like the cloud, data analytics and artificial intelligence.
During a press briefing ahead of VMworld, Bob Wambach, VP of marketing at Dell EMC, said the enhanced offerings, which are driven by tighter integration between VMware and Dell and EMC technologies, is further proof that "VMware continues to be a very important company for supplying cloud technologies to customers".
"As the merger progresses, we're all getting better at aligning our roadmaps and working together," he said.
The fast-growing hyperconverged infrastructure space is a key focus for the company at VMworld, and numbers from IDC may suggest why. The analyst firm says global hyperconverged infrastructure revenue grew 110 percent over the previous year to $2.2 billion in 2016 and predicts the market will grow beyond $7.6 billion by 2021.
Fast adoption by businesses looking to modernize their datacenters is drawing a growing number of competitors, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which earlier this year completed its $650 million acquisition of SimpliVity, and Cisco, which this month announced intentions to buy partner Springpath.
In addition, HPE and Lenovo both introduced new offerings at VMworld that leverage VMware software for converged environments. HPE unveiled Synergy Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, a composable infrastructure aimed at making it easier and less expensive for businesses to roll out private clouds, while Lenovo announced the ThinkAgile VX Series of preconfigured hyperconverged infrastructure solutions based on its ThinkSystem platform, which uses vSAN to help businesses improve management and efficiency.
At the show, Dell EMC officials announced that its VxRail appliances, which leverage VMware vSAN and are jointly engineered with VMware, will be available next month with the latest version of VxRail 4.5 software, which is said to bring greater automation, scalability, security and lifecycle management capabilities to VMware technologies, including vSphere 6.5 update 1 and vSAN 6.6 update 1.
The company also rolled out the VxRack SDDC software-defined datacenter, which is now based on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and includes VMware technologies, such as VMware Cloud Foundation. It also integrates with VMware software, including vSphere 6.5, vSAN 6.6 and NSX 6.3, in a single rack.
"This is more of a datacenter-in-a-box at scale," Wambach said. "This is the easiest and fastest way to stand up a virtual machine environment."
In addition, Dell EMC, in an effort to help businesses embrace hybrid clouds, introduced turnkey hybrid cloud platforms Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) and Native Hybrid Cloud (NHC). EDC is available now on the VxRack SDDC, while NHC is available on the solution via an early-access program.
For EHC, Dell EMC is adding Microsoft Azure among the public clouds it supports, as well as multi-site capabilities, which means businesses can scale their hybrid cloud environments up to four sites through a single portal and with virtual machine-level disaster recovery and management.
NHC includes high-availability deployments on VxRail and Workbench, which is a set of tools for developers and operators now available in Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
Dell EMC and VMware are also collaborating on VMware Ready Systems from Dell EMC - pre-tested cloud offerings that combine VMware cloud software, Dell EMC's VxRail appliances and VxRack SDDC systems and Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes for the 14th generation of PowerEdge Servers.